SWIV Concept Art, Doodles and Notes: Part 2

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SWIV/Silkworm Team: Dan Marchant, Ron Pieket, John Croudy, Warren Mills, Ned Langman

These days, if you work for a big company, the development of most games doesn't even start without the creation of some sort of GDD (Game Design Document) and tonnes of market research.

Back in 1990, our process was much more, shall we say, organic? I just had a large A4 notebook on my desk during the development of SWIV, into which I scribbled notes, doodles, ideas and completely random stuff that I don't understand now!

I was so pleased to recently discover that I'd kept this book. This is where I made all my notes while making SWIV. Most times I wouldn't put pen to paper, but would work directly from brain to computer. And even when I did sketch an idea, by the time it became pixels it would look totally different. But the fact that any visual record of my process exists at all is pretty amazing!

It's hard to get my 50 year old brain to unravel what my 21 year old brain was thinking. I did have an over-active imagination tried to cram so many ideas into that game - some worked well, some not so much, and anything that didn't make it into the Amiga version, did end up in the snes version, Super SWIV 2 years later.

It wasn't all made up as we went along - there was some sort of game design. Below are our nicknames for the various types of enemy. Fodder was anything that came in large, easy to kill waves. Goose was the copter that dropped pick-ups. Yelhoming were those little yellow copters that would home in on you (also in Silkworm)

I also have a few pages where I scribbled stuff for Super SWIV, so I'll post those up in part 3. Some of my favourite stuff in this book however, are the ideas for games that never got made, so I'll put all that up too. But until then, here's some more random SWIV doodles.

Puntettay.